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Typing Nightmare

I was reading someone blogging about blogging, wherein the author critiqued using a static site generator for a blog by exclaiming “you can’t even post without a computer!” This statement implicitly proposes the possibility of publishing a blog post with something other than a computer. I assume the unmentioned alternative here is a telephone. For me this is nightmare fuel.

You know how sometimes you’ll have a dream where you need to run, and then suddenly the air is molasses and you can only move in slow motion? I’ve had dreams like that, but instead of needing to run I need to type a message, and instead of the air becoming molasses I find I only have a phone. Nightmare.

I don’t understand how people internet without a keyboard. My thumbs don’t work like that.

admin

Recruitment

Back in May I received an email, improperly routed to my spam folder, which contained my (long-expected) invitation to join the Illuminati. I’ve yet to receive further details, but I figure I’m basically in at this point. It isn’t like they’re going to send me a secret decoder ring in the mail.

Date: Mon, 19 May 2025 14:25:37 +0300

From: The illuminati alexandr@medicine-it.ru

To: Recipients alexandr@medicine-it.ru

Subject: illuminati recruitment.

Greetings, from the illuminati world elite empire, Are you a business Man/woman, politician, musician, student, employee. Do you strive to expand your knowledge to achieve personal growth, Do you want to be rich?, need protection, be powerful and famous. If YES!. Then you can achieve your dreams by being a member of the great illuminati empire, Once you are a member all your dreams and heart desire can be fully accomplish. With this brief summary, If you are interested to become a member of the great illuminati then get back to us for more information about joining the illuminati. kindly reply us back on our direct recruitment email only at: infoilluminati@religious.com Please note, Kindly make sure all your response are send directly to the email stated above.

This is my second favorite recruitment offer. The first being when, in the year of our lord two thousand and eighteen (or was it ‘17), I received a phone call from a (purported) CIA recruiter (allegedly) encouraging me to apply for a role in the (recently renamed) Directorate of Operations.

It is periodic acknowledgement like this that leads me to believe I am making the right life choices.

admin, micro, media

I met someone the other day who asked what my blog was about.

I was briefly stumped. I try not to be about. I replied “Well, I think the last few posts were about notebooks, opera glasses, tea, and bicycle mirrors.”

If I wasn’t me, I would be in to me.

admin, micro

One of the things that I find refreshing about running an isolated personal blog, as opposed to whatever social hellscape the rest of the online population is participating in today, is not caring about the audience.

Or even knowing if there is one. (I could look at the web server logs, but I don’t.) I post for a hypothetical reader who is me but not me.

When choosing what to write about, I usually think “If I found this post on another site, would I think it was cool?”. And, reader, I do. So fucking cool.

admin, micro

I try to avoid being a topic-specific blog.

I don’t want this to be a blog that is only about backpacking, or bikes, or Linux. I want to cover all of my interests – which range widely – in a way that others don’t (or can’t). I dislike it when other blogs publish long posts that only regurgitate what others wrote, or simply latch onto a popular topic without adding anything new to the discussion. I only began blogging again in September, which makes for a small selection of posts in this year’s archives to evaluate. Looking back, I’m pleased with the diversity of topics covered.

Calvin and Hobbes: New Years Resolution

admin, blogroll

A Better Blogroll

The blogroll is a standard feature of most blogs that is conspicuously absent from the current version of this website. In the past I’ve struggled to keep my blogroll up-to-date. In order to be useful, I think the blogroll should contain only blogs that I am currently reading. That list fluctuates frequently, and I have a poor track record of keeping my blogroll in sync with my feed reader. One of the problems is that I regularly read many blogs, but there are very few blogs out there whose every post I enjoy.

But I use microblogging to share links. So, why not just continue with that method? When I created the latest version of this blog I decided to do away with the blogroll entirely. Now, when I read a blog post that I particularly enjoy, I blog about it. Like here or here. When I come across a blog that is full of wonderful posts, I blog about it too – and, chances are, I’ll still end up blogging about individual articles on those websites. All of these microposts are assigned the blogroll tag.

To me this seems like a much more meaningful way to share links. Rather than maintaining a separate page with a list of not-frequently updated links, you have the blogroll tag archive. Links are timestamped and curated, which makes it more useful to my readers. And I think that linking to specific content rather than full domains makes for a more useful and rewarding metric for the owners of the linked blogs.

admin, twitter

Leaving Twitter Behind

The web has been moving more and more towards a centralized structure. Services like Twitter, Facebook, Google and Flickr are all examples of this. To me, it is a disturbing trend. It’s bad for the internet as a whole, and on a more personal level is damaging to individual liberty and freedom. Lately, I’ve been making a stronger effort to forgo these services.

During the year that I took off from blogging, I maintained a steady presence on Twitter. When I decided to relaunch my blog, I knew I wanted to integrate Twitter-like microblogging into the site somehow. Looking over my Twitter history, it was clear that I was predominately using the service for one thing: sharing links. There’s no reason that I couldn’t do that on my blog. In fact, some of the earliest web logs were simply lists of interesting links.

I rarely participate in conversations on Twitter. I find it to be a horrible medium for that. Conversations that begin with microblog posts can be handled with any blog comment software (and I think the resulting experience is much improved over what Twitter can offer). If you use Twitter to contact people and start conversations, a blog probably won’t work for you. (But there’s a great distributed social networking platform out there that you might want to look into. It’s called email.)

Initially I considered adding a new model to vellum for microposts. When I thought about what a micropost is and what I wanted to do with them, I decided that modifying vellum was unnecessary. I’ve seen some people claim that microposts don’t have titles, but I think that’s incorrect: the primary content is the title. In addition to the title, the micropost needs a place to include the URL that is being shared. Why not just put that in the post body? The URL can simply be pasted into the field, ala Twitter, or included as an anchor tag contained within a new sentence. All that I needed was to uniquely style the microposts.

I decided to place all microposts in a new micro category. Posts in that category are then styled differently. This allows the user to quickly differentiate these short microposts from the more traditional, long-form articles. It also helps to represent the relationship of the title and the rest of the post.

With this in place, I no longer had a need for Twitter, but I still wanted to feed all of my posts into the service. I know some people use Twitter as a sort of weird feed reader, and I have no problem pumping a copy of my data into centralized services. As it turns out, there are a number of services out there that will monitor a feed and post the results to services like Twitter. I started out with FeedBurner, but this seemed like overkill as I had no intention of utilizing the other FeedBurner offerings (giving up control of the namespace of your feed is another instance of the craziness associated with the move to a centralized web). After some brief experimentation, I settled on dlvr.it.

This accomplishes everything that I was looking for. All of my blog posts, micro or not, are now on my blog (fancy that). I retain ownership and control of all my data. Everything is archived and searchable. I’m not depending on some fickle, centralized service to shorten the links that I’m trying to share. People who want to follow my updates can subscribe to my feed in their feed reader of choice. My activity can still be followed in Twitter, but I don’t have any active participation in that service.

I’ve found that not attempting to restrain myself to a character limit is like a breath of fresh air. Previously I was able to share links only. There was little-to-no space left over for commentary. Now I can include my thoughts about the link being shared, whether it be a book that I’m reading or a news article that piques my interest. This is more satisfying to me, and I think results in a more meaningful experience for those who are interested in my thoughts.

Since moving to this system, I’ve only launched my Twitter client two or three times. I’ve found that I don’t miss the stream. I never followed too many people on Twitter. Many of those whom I did follow maintain some sort of blog with a feed that I subscribe to. Some don’t. That’s unfortunate, but if your online presence exists solely within a walled garden, I’m ok with not following you.

admin, design, css

Mark Two

Hi there. It’s been a while.

I took a year off from blogging. That wasn’t intentional. I just didn’t have anything to say for a while. Then I did have something to say, but I was tired of how the website looked. If the design doesn’t excite me I tend not to want to blog. (Call me vain, but I want my words to look good.) And redesigning the website – well, that requires an entirely different set of motivations to tackle. It took me some time to get that motivation, and then before I knew it we were here: 10 days short of a year.

During the development process I referred to this design as “mark two”, as it was the second idea I tried out.

The website still runs on Django. The blog is still powered by Vellum, my personal blog application. I’ve been hacking in it for over a year now (even when this website was inactive) and it is much improved since the last time I mentioned it. In the past six months I’ve seen the light of CSS preprocessors. All of the styling for this design is written in SASS and uses the excellent Compass framework. The responsive layout is built with Susy.

If you’re interested in these technical details, you will also be interested to know that the entire website is now open-source. You can find it on GitHub. Fork it, hack it, or borrow some of my CSS for your website.

The other big news is that I have begun to categorize blog posts. Yeah, it’s 2012 and I’m a little late to the party on that one. You may recall that I only began to tag posts in 2008. As it stands right now, all posts are just placed in the great big ameba of a category called “General”. Eventually, they will all have more meaningful categories – I hope. But it will be a while.

Things ought to be more active around here for the foreseeable future.